Next up on the Countdown (if you've missed a previous entry, just click on the "Top Twenty Countdowns" label in the right sidebar):
#19. "Rest Stop"
While driving home late at night from a Florida mystery writers group meeting, John Dykstra ponders his double life as a "literary werewolf" (by day he is an urbane professor of English at FSU, but he moonlights as an author--under the pseudonym "Rick Hardin"--of a series of crime novels featuring the "urban warrior" hitman-character, the "Dog"). This duality comes into play when a pressing need to relieve himself leads Dykstra to pull off at a highway rest stop. At first he is paralyzed when he overhears a man brutally beating his pregnant girlfriend inside the women's room, but then Dykstra finds the courage to intervene by turning to his Hardin alter ego.
The only problem is, "Hardin" proves more vigilante than knight in shining armor, using excessive force to subdue the abusive male, Lee. Hardin is surprised by his own actions after giving the prostrate figure a sharp kick in the hip, but what dismays him even more is "that he wanted to do it again, and harder. He liked that cry of pain and fear, could do with hearing it again." And then he can't help but wonder "how hard he could kick old Lee-Lee in the left ear without sacrificing accuracy for force." When first approaching the rest stop, Dykstra's writerly imagination pictures a lone missile command silo somewhere in the American heartland, "and the guy in charge is suffering from some sort of carefully-concealed (but progressive) mental illness." The final turn of the screw in King's story, though, is that such burgeoning craziness might be an apt description of Dykstra/Hardin himself.
King has gone the "unruly pseudonym" route before (cf. The Dark Half), but never as succinctly as he does here in "Rest Stop" (incidentally, in the notes at the end of Just After Sunset, King explains that the story was drawn from a similar experience inside a Florida rest stop, a situation that forced him to think, "I'll have to summon my inner Richard Bachman here, because he's tougher than me."). The story points to the savagery always lurking just beneath the surface of human civility; Dykstra realizes that "under the right circumstances, anyone could end up anywhere, doing anything." Besides drawing on the Jekyll-and-Hyde archetype, the story utilizes the time-honored motif of the "wrong turn" (while facing the predicament of how to deal with the ruckus inside the women's room, Dykstra deems his stopping off at that particular rest area "the evening's great mistake"). But perhaps what truly distinguishes this work of American Gothic is King's depiction of the rest-stop setting. Even at the best of times, these way stations have a forlorn air about them; after all, they are designed to facilitate transience (an appropriate ad banner might be "Eat. Excrete. Retreat."). And when encountered in their desolate, late-night state, they can be downright ominous. King seems well aware of this as he transforms a rest stop on the open road between Jacksonville and Sarasota into a Gothic locale, complete with missing children posters papering the walls and alligators presumably lying in the building's swampy perimeter.
So next time you're out riding the highway in the wee hours of the morning and you feel nature calling you as you come up on a rest stop, just remember: good things come to those who wait until they get home.
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